1. "Love is a Battlefield" - Pat Benatar....those dance moves...I thought nerve-gas had been banned under the "geneva convention"?

2. "(I'm Your)Turbo Lover"- Judas Priest....(see above)

3. "Every Little Step"- Bobby Brown....And here, I thought the ego-size that MAD-TV makes fun of was exaggerated...Watch as a 19 YO(?) Brown gyrates and "pops", with that tiny little body, under that globe-sized head...Arguably the quintessential hip-hop vid...Ridiculous...immaculate.(ok, the tune is catchy, and the "flygirls" in those slinky little black dresses are pretty damn hot.)

5.(and the hands-down winner) "Let's Go All the Way" - Sly Fox...What can I say?...Take early '80s New Wave(2nd british invasion), send it to america long enough for it to mix with neon-hip-hop, bombastic-and-ego-drenched adolescent male fantasy, and then send it back to Great Britain, to be regurgitated as a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-dead-genre-or-two...For a final touch of surreal absurdity, add some naive/simplistic socio-political "subtext"....(Or, just click link for best-good hirarity....)

(note: I have disqualified milli-vanilli from contention in my list, due to fab's ultimate suicide being kind of a buzzkill on the mockery.)

Any other noteworthy videos spring to mind?(or has your psyche blocked them?)

OK, now from someone who watched MTV from the start, and gave up on it when it gave up on 24-hour videos. I'm picking these not as the best songs, but as videos whose images have wormed their way into our culture.

4. Thriller, Michael Jackson, long version. This was when he was still good, and before he had his nose removed. All the John Landis work straight out of American Werewolf in London really makes this one.

5. I can't decide, either Burning Down the House by Talking Heads, or Addicted to Love, by Robert Palmer. The Heads are hands down my favorite 80's band, but Addicted to Love brought us those amazing bimbos, which appeared in increasing numbers in Palmer's next two videos, and have now become so iconic they are showing up in Emerald Nuts commercials.

I note as I watch early videos, that they weren't so much "directed" as assembled.

Back when they were a tack-on-extra to the promotion-scheme, without real proven benefit, the record cos. seemed to just let the band frolic/indulge in "playtime", etc.

You'll see videos where it looks like each of five band members were picking childhood movie/tv fantasies to live out.a car chase, an exploding cardboard shack on a runway somewhere, a knight on horseback scooping up a bikini-girl from a beach, a skydiver landing in a swimming-pool of whipped cream, and a motorcycle jump over a mound of dirt in the woods....all in the same video.(a ballad, no less).

I guess my thread title was too vague....My natural cynicism led me to assume all would understand immediately that my "should be preserved for all time" was meant to convey the idea that said preservation was for the purpose of serving as a warning.

You know, like the pictogram they're trying to invent for the nuclear rod-dumpsite.

Still, I am not displeased with the addition of good '80s references to this topic.But that seems to be the majority.

See, I took it to mean as if in a time capsule. Some good, some bad, some just odd... just things that are representative. It would have had another one or two on it if Prince wasn't such a control-freak of his videos.

The problem with a lot of the bad videos from the 80's are that they were just plain boring. Some singer with a big ego, bigger hair, moody lighting, singing a repetitive ballad with lots of close-ups. Yawn. On heavy rotation. Double yawn. Nothing to preserve there.

Cue the RickRoll!

OK, so bad songs with a memorable video. I nominate Torture by the Jacksons. Way over-the-top pretentious, interesting, if stupid, visuals, and Michael is represented by his glove, and a waxwork.

If you want a heterosexy version of the song, find kylie's 'live in sydney' concert dvd.Herself in slinky dress, singing a sultry version from inside a cage, its outside dripping with sexy dancers, writhing in a whorish defiance of both gravity and decorum.